Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe

Abstract

This article addresses some implications for gender equality and gender policy at European and national levels of transformations in family, economy and polity, which challenge gender regimes across Europe. Women's labour market participation in the west and the collapse of communism in the east have undermined the systems and assumptions of western male breadwinner and dual worker models of central and eastern Europe. Political reworking of the work/welfare relationship into active welfare has individualised responsibility. Individualisation is a key trend west − and in some respects east − and challenges the structures that supported care in state and family. The links that joined men to women, cash to care, incomes to carers have all been fractured. The article will argue that care work and unpaid care workers are both casualties of these developments. Social, political and economic changes have not been matched by the development of new gender models at the national level. And while EU gender policy has been admired as the most innovative aspect of its social policy, gender equality is far from achieved: women's incomes across Europe are well below men's; policies for supporting unpaid care work have developed modestly compared with labour market activation policies. Enlargement brings new challenges as it draws together gender regimes with contrasting histories and trajectories. The article will map social policies for gender equality across the key elements of gender regimes -paid work, care work, income, time and voice -and discuss the nature of a model of gender equality that would bring gender equality across these. It analyses ideas about a dual earner-dual carer model, in the Dutch combination scenario and 'universal caregiver' models, at household and civil society levels. These offer a starting point for a model in which paid and unpaid work are equally valued and equally shared between men and women, but we argue that a citizenship model, in which paid and unpaid work obligations are underpinned by social rights, is more likely to achieve gender equality.

Long working hours and health status among employees in Europe: between-country differences

“…The different patterns found among women in these dual breadwinner typologies can be explained by the reduction in the support for families and children in a range of areas in Eastern European countries: family allowance, nursery provision, sick child leave, and parental benefits (28,44). Moreover, traditional family values are much more common in post-communist countries than Western industrialized countries (29). Since long working hours were more frequent among married women, work conflict and overload derived from the double burden of job and family demands could partly explain our findings (45,46).…”

“…However, within the family, traditional ways of constructing men and women's roles remain. Moreover, the economic damage to state revenues has undermined the social policies that supported them as workers and mothers (28,29).…”

Is there still gender on the agenda for spatial planning theories?:Attempt to an integrative approach to generate gender-sensitive planning theories

“…There is still gender inequality concerning the distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men as well as equal payment for equal work. In their research, Pascall and Lewis (2004) demonstrated that equal treatment across the five levels of political intervention (voice, paid work, incomes, care work, time) has not been achieved in any of the European countries studied. Sanchez de Madariaga (2013: 329) argues that 'recognizing and making visible unpaid work in the city, giving and effectively improving the physical environment in which it is performed, can be a powerful means for transforming gender relations in the longer term, above and beyond providing short term improvement to women's lives'.…”

Documenting Essex‐Boy as a local gendered regime

“…Yet, despite the publication of seminal books on masculinity by Bly (2001) and Keen (1992), no studies by male entrepreneurship scholars specifically tackle the masculinity-entrepreneurship interface (Burns, 1991). Pascall and Lewis (2004) identified voice as a key element of gender regimes. Thus, I…”